The gaffes of the Commission and the European Parliament put Azeri gas and oil supplies at risk
Azerbaijan's gas and oil are key to the EU's effort to replace Russia's fossil fuels, but those hopes risk crashing against the ambition of European authorities to somehow become arbiter in the Caucasus.
The EU has sent a civilian mission to help police the Armenian side of the tense mountainous border between the two countries, which has greatly angered Azerbaijan, which is known to have a border problem with the other Caucasian republic. At the same time, a European Parliament report condemning Azerbaijan's human rights record sparked outrage in Baku.
All of this casts a shadow over the EU's high-profile deal with Azerbaijan to double its annual gas supplies to the bloc to 20 billion cubic meters by 2027.
Speaking to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, a senior EU diplomatic service official complained that the monitoring mission appears to have soured relations. “ We were hoping for a different scenario with Baku. We are sharing with Azerbaijan all relevant information about patrols and so on, because we don't want any problems .”
With Russia distracted by its catastrophic war against Ukraine, Brussels hoped to strengthen its presence in the South Caucasus, building economic ties with Azerbaijan while offering political support to neighboring Armenia, in an attempt to maintain a balance between the two Rival states. EU diplomats hoped to keep both sides together, but it didn't work out. The 100 civilian observers sent from Brussels are seen as unacceptable interference by Baku.
In a speech last month, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev criticized outside interference in his country's standoff with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. "The mediators involved in the Karabakh conflict [are trying] not to resolve the issue but to freeze it," he said, arguing that Baku rejects attempts to "tire us with meaningless negotiations."
In 2020, Aliyev launched a successful military offensive to recapture large swathes of Nagorno-Karabakh, a separate region within Azerbaijan's internationally recognized borders but controlled since the fall of the USSR by its ethnic Armenian population. The conflict ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire, but tensions are rising and there are fears of a return to full-blown fighting. "Many Armenians believe there will be a spring offensive by Azerbaijan," EU head of mission Markus Ritter told Deutsche Welle. "If this doesn't happen, our mission is already a success."
Days earlier, the country's state media said the EU mission was actually helping to "provoke Azerbaijan into a new war", letting "the EU take the blame" for any new conflict.
“Azerbaijan and Russia are basically saying the same thing: that the EU mission is a military espionage operation under the cover of monitoring,” the EU official added. "They have tried to discredit the mission, which is exclusively civilian and non-armed, from the beginning and there's not much we can do about it."
Vaqif Sadıqov, head of Azerbaijan's mission to the EU, told POLITICO that the presence of the monitors near the border with Azerbaijan worries Baku. “This is a bilateral issue between Armenia and the EU, but it is happening a few hundred meters from our border posts and in a heavily militarized environment where we have Russian border guards, Armenian border guards, Russian regular units , Armenian regular units and, closer to the Iranian border, Iran's military. Now we also have EU peacekeepers. So we have legitimate security issues,” he said. Sadıqov warned that the mission could be seen as an attempt by Brussels to strengthen its presence in the region.
Therefore, the initiatives of the Commission and of the Parliament risk jeopardizing the attempts of European countries to obtain supplies from Azerbaijan, thus partially replacing the energy supplies coming from Russia. Unfortunately, Brussels' maximalism is in fact paid for by the citizens, whose well-being is almost never considered by either the Commission or Parliament.
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The article Commission and European Parliament gaffes put Azerbaijani gas and oil supplies at risk comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/le-gaffe-del-parlamento-europeo-mettono-a-rischio-le-forniture-di-gas-e-petrolio-azero/ on Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:24:40 +0000.